Bonus day with Ana

Well, the punch line of this story is that we went to court today and the hearing went well, and we were granted our request for adoption – so that is GREAT news. As it happened…our supposed 10am appointment at the court finally got underway about 4:25pm! There were no issues with our paperwork or anything, this was just one of those random things that can happen; who knows, maybe something pressing came up for the courts or an official was out of the office unexpectedly, or whatever. In fact, there were probably 4 additional families who also were supposed to have their court hearings in the morning, and all of us were delayed until the afternoon.

So this threw us for a loop only because we were supposed to have our court appt at 10am and then be on a plane to Almaty at 3pm. So after waiting from 10am until about 1pm, we ended up changing our flight to Almaty to one day later (so now Thursday we go from Ust back to Almaty). We should still be in plenty of time for our flights back to the states, we should land in Almay about 5pm Thursday and our flight to Frankfurt doesn’t leave until 3am so some 10 hours later.

But now we do get one added bonus, we get to see Ana one last time tomorrow morning, since our flight (there is only 1 per day from Ust to Almaty) doesn’t leave until 3pm. So we are now back in the Shiny River for our second “last night.”

The big news of the day, though, is of course that the court hearing went well. All that now remains, at least from the perspective of the Kazakh adoption process, is to run out the clock on the 16 day waiting period. So now we’ll count the days until July 26.

We’re not sure if we’ll be able to post again before we get back to the States – hopefully we won’t be writing from the Shiny River again tomorrow night!

Some pictures below, one of Ana teething, one of her noticeably not enjoying a Mets hat (we’ll need to fix that), also a picture of the boys on a little boat at a park we found and Matthew in front of the WWII monument (we had a lovely walk by the river & monument with our translator, Olga, who has been a great help to us). Also one is a shot of a picture Joseph made for Ana's room while we're gone.

-The Byrne Family